Thai Palace owner recounts long road from Laos village to refugee camp to Holland business

Sue Somsanith still gets chills looking at the mug shots and numerical identification tags assigned to all six members of her immediate family after fleeing from their homeland of Laos and spending two years in a refugee camp in Thailand in the mid-1980s.

Sue Somsanith still gets chills looking at the mug shots and numerical identification tags assigned to all six members of her immediate family after fleeing from their homeland of Laos and spending two years in a refugee camp in Thailand in the mid-1980s.

It dredges up feelings of fright, fear and childhood innocence lost.

“I was 11 years old when we fled. I remember being woken up at 3 or 4 o’clock one morning and told we were leaving,” said Somsanith, who is celebrating her 10th anniversary as owner of Thai Palace restaurant, 977 Butternut Drive, on Holland’s north side this year. “We had to walk for miles in the dark through the woods to where my uncle had parked a wooden boat. We had to avoid the snipers on both sides of the Mekong River (along the Laos-Thailand border). The current of the river was very strong. We had to be careful the boat didn’t tip over.

“I remember everything. As the oldest child, I was very responsible. I had to be,” she added. “I remember the escape — what I had to do and what it meant to be quiet.

“It just brings back all those memories.”

It ended up being the start of a difficult, but newly rewarding, life.

Her parents, Dan and Thongdy Vongkaysone, sold most of their belongings and their property to relatives for a modest sum of gold to help secure passage for themselves and their four daughters, ages 11, 5, 2 and a few months old, to Ban Napha refugee camp.

Dan Vongkaysone, a driver for CIA operatives during the Vietnam War according to his daughter, feared for his life and his family’s safety when Laos fell under socialist rule for more than two decades. It was during this period the Laos government embarked on a campaign of genocide, killing an estimated one-quarter of its population of 400,000 people with help from the Vietnamese army.

The family spent the next two years languishing in the refugee camp.

At age 13, Somsanith, along with her parents and three younger sisters, emigrated to the U.S. as part of an effort to resettle a reported 250,000 Laos refugees from Thailand. The Vongkaysones were sent to live with a sponsor family in Chicago for two weeks, got shipped to a second sponsor family in Milwaukee, and, finally, settled in Wausau, Wis., which became a haven for Hmong immigrants beginning in the 1970s after the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War.

Initially, it was anything but a Norman Rockwell portrait for them.

The Vongkaysones faced a language barrier and struggled to adjust to American life, which presented them with all sorts of cultural challenges, including where to find the proper ingredients to prepare authentic Laos and Thai dishes.

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“We didn’t speak any English when we first got here,” she said.

Somsanith, who attended Wausau High School, married shortly after graduation. It was an arranged marriage, by her parents, to another Laos native.

In an effort to help support the family, Woody Somsanith and his new wife moved to Holland in 1995. He got a job at Bil Mar Foods while she enrolled at Davenport College.

Sue Somsanith soon had to drop out of college.

“I had to drop out because we couldn’t afford it,” she said of the first of two stints at Davenport. “I got a job assembling chairs at Herman Miller from 1995-2001. I even drove a (forklift) and worked in the distribution center for a while.

“I started going back to school in 1999-2000 to pursue a degree in business administration. I said, ‘I can’t do this forever,’ so I left Herman Miller to get into real estate.”

She got her Realtor’s license and spent the next year at Greenridge Realty before experiencing a second life-changing event — a request she felt compelled to fulfill.

Finding her true calling

Although she and Woody had begun to build a new life in Holland, the remainder of the Vongkaysone family continued to struggle to make ends meet in Wausau.

Sue Somsanith’s mother pleaded with her to open a restaurant.

“I gave up my real estate career and focused on opening Thai Palace. My mother asked me to open a restaurant for my family — so they could all have jobs,” she recalled. “She figured this is what we know, but I had the passion for food, too.”

She gave up her real estate license and dropped out of college again.

Woody Somsanith opposed the idea of opening a restaurant in Holland. He wasn’t convinced a Thai restaurant would be accepted in the conservative Dutch community.

But Sue adhered to her mother’s wishes.

“I had to make money to support the family,” Sue Somsanith said. “I wanted to open it really bad. It seemed so fabulous. It happened so fast, though. We made a decision to open the restaurant in July of 2003, and we had it open by November.

“We had this place up and running in four months. It was too fast,” she recalled. “It almost crushed us. I just wasn’t ready to run a business. We knew how to cook good food, but we didn’t know how to service customers or how to market our restaurant.”

There were times she thought about shutting the doors.

It was a tumultuous first couple of years and then the Great Recession hit. Instead, she persevered and found her place in the local restaurant landscape by seeking refuge among local business leaders.

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She reached out to the West Coast Chamber of Commerce and received a helping hand that has made all the difference in transforming Thai Palace into a lasting success.

“I wasn’t sure if Holland would accept me,” she said. “I’m proud to still be here today with the support of the community. I wouldn’t be here without the chamber helping introduce me to the community. We first had to prove ourselves to everyone.”

As authentic as it gets

Sue Somsanith joined the West Coast Chamber in January of 2004.

She began to network with local business leaders, telling them about her remarkable story and encouraging them to spread the word while giving her food a chance.

The results are impossible to ignore.

The food at Thai Palace has earned a strong reputation for authenticity and Sue Somsanith has earned a reputation for being an “active and engaged member” of the business community, according to West Coast Chamber President Jane Clark.

In 2008, her restaurant was honored as Minority Business of the Year in Holland.

“Sue is a warm, gracious, hardworking individual. She has been an asset to our organization and the community,” Clark said. “I am sure that Thai Palace will continue to provide wonderful dining experiences to its patrons for years to come.”

It all stems from the determination Sue Somsanith learned as a child.

It started with her coming home from school and being assigned cooking chores for the entire family while her father and mother labored in the rice fields in their small village in Laos.

“My job was to go to school every day and then come home and cook and clean,” she said of being the eldest child and helping care for her three sisters. “Life was fabulous. No shoes, no car, no problems. We thought we had everything. We grew all our own food, and my parents worked all day in the rice paddies.

“On the way home, they’d bring fish from the pond.”

Sue Somsanith took pleasure in tending to the family garden that produced eggplant, tomatoes, different lettuces, cabbage, lemongrass, ginger, mint, limes, papayas and mangos. All are ingredients that heavily influence the Thai Palace menu.

“I just did what I was told. I learned to cook as a child. My mother taught me how to cook rice, fish and vegetables,” she said. “One fish would feed the entire family. We’d make soup with it. Everyone got one piece of fish. That’s all you’d get.

“We only had beef or pork once a year for big celebrations.”

Deep-fried food? It’s not something that was part of her childhood.

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“Our menu here consists of a lot of vegetables,” Sue Somsanith said. “We don’t deep fry. I don’t ever remember eating a deep-fried meal as a child. We grilled, we steamed things. We used a lot of herbs that we grew right there in our yard.”

Investing in the future

Sue Somsanith, 38, a proud wife, mother of two boys and a successful small-business owner, has applied some of the same childhood lessons to Thai Palace.

Although it had become a popular local dining spot, she felt the 10th anniversary was the right time to reinvest in the future growth of her restaurant.

It remained closed for 11 days in February to install new equipment in the kitchen and redesign the decor with the help of Shade Above in Grand Haven, including input from sister B.T., a local artist, who painted the murals adorning the walls.

“We started pretty much as a mom-and-pop shop,” younger sister Tang Vongkaysone, the full-time dining manager, said. “It was very small and very local at first. My sister has worked very hard to get to this point. We have people come from Chicago and New York and a lot of tourists that tell us how authentic the food is here.

“I really appreciate my parents bringing us over here and giving us an opportunity for a better life. They gave everything up,” she added. “We come from a very humble beginning.”

It’s a humbling path Sue Somsanith has never forgotten.

The redone 3,500-square-foot restaurant features an upscale, modern appearance with seating for 100 people inside, but it also offers take-out service. Its owner couldn’t be prouder of what she has accomplished, but she makes sure to remember it took sacrifices on the parts of many family members to reach this point.

“I keep this by my bed,” she said of the official documents and black-and-white photographs of her family used for processing them from the refugee camp for relocation to the U.S. “Every time I get stressed out about work, I look at it and think: ‘I could be in the refugee camp or running a restaurant.’ I’ve experienced it all, so I know the difference.

“Sometimes, I have to pinch myself. I never dreamed I’d be running my own business.”